The Logic of the AND: Expanding the Conversation About Visual Methods AND Epistemology in Qualitative Health Research

As invited, this article enters into a methodological AND philosophical conversation with Sayra Cristancho and Esther Helmich (2019), about employing visual methods in qualitative health research, as this has intertwined epistemological, ontological, and ethical implications. I consider the use of visual methods as a window through which we might examine the philosophical foundations of qualitative health research. I characterise some of the extant studies to be 'good old-fashioned qualitative research', after Svend Brinkmann (2015), and offer the paradigm of sociomaterialism, as encapsulated by Deleuze and Guattari's "logic of the AND" (1987, p. 25), to both trouble the research AND offer possibilities for researching differently. I expand the conversation through the pane of the logic of the AND and suggest two ways we might make different use of visual methods in qualitative health research: drawing-with and drawing-in-response-to. Thus, we can shift towards researching differently in order to create different knowledge. An ethical and urgent purpose for expanding this conversation is that when we understand visual methods as sociomaterial practices, we move closer to dissolving the normative Cartesian binaries that perpetuate social and planetary harms, thus doing better justice to our entangled, relational human and more-than-human world.